Recently in LISA Category

Congrats to the LISA organizing committee for another successful conference! The Usenix LISA conference was in Boston this year, and ran Sunday to Friday as usual. This was the 30th conference.

What I learned:

I learned that the coming generation of servers from Dell/HP/etc. will have terabytes of persistent RAM (RAM that retains info between reboots). Operations will have to radically change how they do operations (rebooting won't clear RAM). Software engineers will be re-thinking software designs. (John Roese, Dell EMC)

I learned that Homomorphic encryption lets you do math on encrypted data, and you get encrypted results. No need to decrypt the source material. I also learned the limits of blockchain/bitcoin hype. (Radia Perlman)

I learned that story telling is more powerful than facts, and it can be as simple as starting out a presentation with an anecdote that involves a conflict and a resolution. (Jessica Hilt)

I learned that Total Ownership Model solves a lot of operations ills by making everyone responsible for uptime, so devs and ops have an inventive to work together. (Courtney Eckhardt)

I learned that Facebook's slides had all IPv6 examples, and icons for "clients" were always phones. Welcome to the future! (Patrick Shuff)

I learned that a non-obvious benefit of using declarative languages for configuration management is that the "preview what changes will be made" feature is practically automatic. (Mitchell Hashimoto, HashiCorp)

I learned that Christine Hogan and I can co-present, finish on time, and people will laugh at our jokes. (Limoncelli/Hogan)

I learned that the LGBTQAA* BoF session had many attendees that were concerned that the title should use .* (a regex) instead of * (a glob). (link)

I learned that a slack.com channel for a conference is great, even when it is unofficial.

I learned that Google is in awe that StackOverflow still doesn't need to shard its database. (Niall Murphy and Todd Underwood, Google)

I learned that a story I told during one tutorial would make a good short-form poem at another. (link)

I learned that Jupyter is an amazing lab notebook. It is a shame I don't use Python any more.

I learned that Machine Learning can be done on a laptop with Python, and useful results can be done without having terabytes of data and thousands of machines. (Matt Harrison, MetaSnake)

The SESA '16 conference (co-located with LISA): I learned about some massive (16,000 students/year) sysadmin education programs, how DevOps can be integrated into university-level system administration curriculum, and more.

The conference gaVe me foresight into technology that will be coming to products in the next 6-18 months and how my job will be affected. It also gave me a lot of new ideas I can implement right away.

I'd also like to thank the people that attended my 2 tutorials, the book signing, and the 3 presentations that Christine and I did. We distributed more than 300 flyers and coupons for our books, and gave away 20 free copies of TPOSANA/TPOCSA. I met a lot of new people this year; definitely more than last year.

I'm looking forward to LISA '17, which will be in San Francisco, October 29-November 3, 2017. The call for participation will be announced soon. Next year's chairs are Connie-Lynne Villani and Caskey Dickson. I look forward to their amazing conference!

"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term. Hardware teams being told to cease development. There will be no Solaris 12, final release will be 11.4. Orders coming straight from Larry."

The crazy people that said that Oracle bought Sun just to shut it down and use the patents to sue Google are looking pretty non-crazy now. I guess once the lawsuit was lost (and boy was it expensive) the shutdown was inevitable.

Of course, not funding SPARC development so that it could stay competitive with Intel didn't help much either.

Christine Hogan and I will be co-presenting a talk at Usenix LISA '16 entitled "Stealing the Best Ideas from DevOps: A Guide for Sysadmins without Developers". Full details are on the LISA website. The talk will cover a lot of the devops-y material from our newest book, the 3rd edition of TPOSANA. We'll be doing a book-signing shortly after the talk.

In addition, I'll also be teaching two half-day tutorials: "Personal Time Management: The Basics for Sysadmins That Are Overloaded" and "How to Not Get Paged: Managing On-Call to Reduce Outages".

The 2015 USENIX Container Management Summit (UCMS '15) will take place November 9, 2015, during LISA15 in Washington, D.C.

Important Dates

Submissions due: September 5, 2015, 11:59 p.m. PDT

Notification to participants: September 19, 2015

Program announced: Late September 2015

(quoting the press release):

UCMS '15 is looking for relevant and engaging speakers and workshop facilitators for our event on November 9, 2015, in Washington, D.C. UCMS brings together people from all areas of containerization--system administrators, developers, managers, and others--to identify and help the community learn how to effectively use containers.

Submissions
Proposals may be 45- or 90-minute formal presentations, panel discussions, or open workshops.

This will be a one-day summit. Speakers should be prepared for interactive sessions with the audience. Workshop facilitators should be ready to challenge the status quo and provide real-world examples and strategies to help attendees walk away with tools and ideas to improve their professional lives. Presentations should stimulate healthy discussion among the summit participants.

Submissions in the form of a brief proposal are welcome though September 5, 2015. Please submit your proposal via email to [email protected] You can also reach the chairs via that email address with any questions or comments. Presentation details will be communicated to the presenters of accepted talks and workshops by September 19, 2015. Speakers will receive a discount for the conference admission. If you have special circumstances, please contact the USENIX office at [email protected]

At the third USENIX Release Engineering Summit (URES '15), members of the release engineering community will come together to advance the state of release engineering, discuss its problems and solutions, and provide a forum for communication for members of this quickly growing field. We are excited that this year LISA attendees will be able to drop in on talks so we expect a large audience.

URES '15 is looking for relevant and engaging speakers for our event on November 13, 2015, in Washington, D.C. URES brings together people from all areas of release engineering--release engineers, developers, managers, site reliability engineers and others--to identify and help propose solutions for the most difficult problems in release engineering today.

Update: 2015-06-16 I changed the title to "some of my proposals" instead of "my proposals". To be clear, I had many rejections this year, I just don't blog about those. That said, I think LISA is a better conference when it increases its speaker diversity and you can't do that if the same few people give a lot of talks.

Did the submissions process for LISA change
in recent years? I recall going to submit a talk a couple years ago
and being really put off by the requirements for talks to be
accompanied by a long paper, and be completely original and not
previously presented elsewhere. Now it seems more in line with other
industry conferences.

Yes, LISA is very different than it was years ago. If you haven't attended LISA in a while, you may not realize how different it is!

The conference used to be focused on papers with a few select "invited talks". A few years ago, the conference changed its focus to be great talks. LISA still accepts "original research" papers, but they're just one track in a much larger conference and have a separate review process. In fact, the conference now publishes both a Call for Participation and a separate Call for Research Papers and Posters.

If LISA is now "talk-centric", what kind of talks does it look for? Quoting from the Call for Participation, "We invite industry leaders to propose topics that demonstrate the present and future state of IT operations. [Talks should] inspire and motivate attendees to take actions that will positively impact their business operations." LISA looks for a diverse mix of speakers, not just gender diversity, but newcomers and experienced speakers alike. We have special help for first time speakers, including assistant with rehearsals and other forms of mentoring.

What about the papers that LISA does publish? The papers have different criteria than talks. They should "describe new techniques, tools, theories, and inventions, and present case histories that extend our understanding of system and network administration." Starting in 2014, the papers have been evaluated by a separate sub-committee of people with academic and research backgrounds. This has had an interesting side-effect: the overall quality of the papers has improved and become more research/forward-looking.

Because LISA mixes industry talks and research papers, attendees get to hear about new ideas along before they become mainstream. Researchers benefit by having the opportunity to network and get feedback from actual practitioners of system administration. This gives LISA a special something you don't find anywhere else.

Another thing that makes LISA better is the "open access" policy. Posters, papers, and presentations are available online at no charge. This gives your work wider visibility, opening up the potential to have greater impact on our industry. Not all conferences do this, not even all non-profit conferences do this.

P.S. LISA has a new mission statement:
LISA is the premier conference for IT operations, where systems engineers, operations professionals, and academic researchers share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.

The schedule for 2014 has been published and OMG it looks like an entirely new conference. By "new" I mean "new material"... I don't see slots filled with the traditional topics that used to get repeated each year. By "new" I also mean that all the sessions are heavily focused on forward-thinking technologies instead of legacy systems. This conference looks like the place to go if you want to move your career forward.

LISA also has a new byline: LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.

This year the LISA CFP is different both in content and form. This represents a big change for this conference LISA. There is less emphasis on academic talks and instead more emphasis on high-impact, cutting edge talks on what sysadmins need to know about today and in the coming 18-24 months. If you consider the changes over the last few years, soon LISA will be unrecognizable (in a good way) from LISA of the past.

I'm excited that LISA is modernizing and updating (and I'm glad to be on the committee).

The form of the CFP is very different too. In past years it has been page after page of text that, to be honest, makes my eyes hurt after a while. Now it is succinct and focused with a "Submit your proposal" link at the end.

I'd like to point out that rather than emphasizing academic research papers, that isn't even mentioned until the end. People that think of LISA as a "ivory tower researcher" conference will be pleasantly surprised. Research papers are now a specific track, constructed by a separate committee so that the main organizing committee can focus on bringing in the best talks and tutorials.

You should also notice that the term "invited talks" no longer appears in the CFP. Everyone is asked to submit their proposals and the committee will pick the best. (This was true in past years, but the term "invited" was left in place.) Of course, the committee will be chasing down particular people and topic experts, but if you don't hear from the committee, don't be shy! Reach out to us!

The schedule of Usenix LISA sessions has been updated with icons that represents categories: DevOps, Cloud System Administration, Coding, Linux, Soft Skills and Women in Advanced Computing. Check it out.

Talks are no more than 5 minutes with no AV (no slides, no videos, no projector). They can be on any topic though we prefer topics related to System Administration. Please keep the content 'professional' in tone.

With only 5 minutes to give the talk it is important that you cut to the chase. I've seen some people make the mistake of spending a lot of time on something inconsequential like how to install the software they're talking about (and the talk wasn't about installation techniques). The best talks I've seen start with a solid explanation of the problem (in terms of the pain being caused) then explain the solution.

Because the talk is limited to 5 minutes, I highly recommend you rehearse in front of a friend or two before hand. It is worth it.

People often tell me they wanted to ask me to sign a copy of my book but "didn't bring it to the conference because they didn't think I'd want to be bothered". The truth is that (nearly) all authors love to be asked to sign their book.

I'll be doing a book signing on Thursday at 1pm in the exhibit hall.

Other authors such as Mark Burgess and Diego Zamboni will be there to sign books too.

In IPv4 there are a number of things that every sysadmin knows. I bet you recognize the following:

127.0.0.1

10.0.0.0/8

192.168.0.1

/24

/26

/32

255.255.255.255

255.255.255.0

You probably didn't even have to think hard about most of those.

So what are the equivalents in IPv6? I don't mean the direct translations, but what is the list of terms and numbers that sysadmins should know?

I recently sat down and came up with such a list. I listed things that Unix and Windows sysadmins should know. WAN/LAN network administrators need to know a lot, lot, more. This just covers common knowledge, a lot like the IPv4 list above.

Next I did what any good geek would do: I made Flashcards.

You can study them, quiz yourself, and even print them out. They make a great birthday gift (not really).

I'd like to thank Phillip Remaker Eliot Lear (both from Cisco) and Shumon Huque (from UPenn) for their help proofreading the cards. Shumon gets special thanks since I used his slides to get most of the information. Shumon will be teaching classes at Usenix LISA 2013 on DNSSEC and, of course, IPv6!

The best technical skills are useless if you can't understand the people you work with, communicate with them, and manage your own time. Here is a list of "soft skills" presentations at LISA this year. No, they won't turn you into a manager.

But here's a little secret about Usenix LISA. The presentations are great, but by just hanging out in the hallway chatting with people (the unofficial "hallway track") you'll get the "inside scoop" that most presentations won't tell you.

So, while many of the LISA presentations are live-streamed, you really should go to the conference. This year it is in Washington D.C., Nov 3-8.

I keep reading all these horror stories about women being treated badly at technical conferences. I haven't seen a lot of positive stories. I think the conferences that are doing a good job need some recognition. That's why I've made a list of presentations being given by women at the next Usenix LISA conference. Conferences that are doing a good job of inclusion need to be highlighted.

I didn't realize there was so much to know about debugging until I worked at a computer repair shop in high school. PC repair has basically two techniques: Technique 1: remove all the cards and add them back until the system doesn't work. The last part you added was the problem. Technique 2: Remove cards one by one until the system works. The last part you removed was the problem.

Someone asked me the other day if I had a "secret of my success". They didn't believe that I got this far on my good looks. (ha ha ha). For most of my career I've been on teams of people where some knew how to code and others didn't. The ones that could code were significantly more productive than the others.

Currently I do most of my programming in Python and BASH. There is an excellent full-day tutorial on Python at this year's LISA. There are also full-day tutorials on Puppet, Chef, BASH Shell Scripting ("the command line" is more than just typing commands, eh?).

I've put together a list of programming-related tutorials at this year's LISA. All of them are taught by people that I personally know are excellent and caring instructors.

A shout out to the conference planning committee of Usenix LISA this year. Narayan and Skaar did a great job! The amount of DevOps content is unbelievable. All 6 days have DevOps content that I want to attend from 9am to 5pm. It is going to run me ragged.

Grants are available for women that want to attend Usenix LISA, in Washington D.C., Nov 3-8.

This year the LISA '13 Grants for Women are Sponsored by Google. Five women will be selected from the applicants to receive $500 US to apply toward travel/accommodation costs. Apply today! (Sept. 30 deadline)

The first time I ever attended a Usenix conference was on a student grant. If I recall correctly I received $80 for round-trip train fare between NJ and Washington D.C. As a student it felt like a million dollars. That was a long time ago. That same ticket now costs about $380.

There is a devops-related talk in every hour of this year's Usenix LISA conference. Usenix LISA Is a general conference with many tracks going on at any time. A little analysis finds there is always at least one DevOps related talk (usually more than one). This is very impressive. The problem, however, is that many of the talk titles don't make this clear. No worries, I've done the research for you.